Forbes columnist Steven Salzberg and author-investigator Joe Nickell will each be awarded the 2012 Robert P. Balles Prize in Critical Thinking, to be presented by the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry at the CFI Summit in October.

Hoaxes: For Better or for Worse

November 19, 2010

Skeptics expose the hoaxes, but should skeptics ever
be the hoaxers?

If hoaxes were true, it would
be a vastly different world. Forwarding an e-mail would get us free
travel, free lattes, free laptops, free shoes, and free beer. We would
be able to buy third-world orphans for use as organ donors and would
make millions of dollars transferring money from Nigerian bank accounts.
We would have evidence of Bigfoot, fairies, giants, and aliens. Christopher
Walken would be president of the United States, and while Will Ferrell,
Axl Rose, and Paul McCartney would be dead, Elvis would still be alive.

With
chain letters, virus hoaxes, and photoshopped images of big alien cats,
it is April Fool’s Day every day online. The advice to “check Snopes
(http://www.snopes.com/)” is becoming as fixed a phrase
as “Google it.” If only there was a Snopes entry for everything
in life.

When a Hoax
Is Not a Hoax

Hoaxes, pranks, practical jokes,
tricks, myths, and urban legends are all related phenomena. There are
similarities and differences among them, but they all have in common
that they are untrue but could be true.

The
claim that Gene Simmons is dead is more of a rumor than a hoax, although
to start a rumor is to hoax. Hoaxes are relatively static in storyline,
while urban legends have less “version control.” Urban legends are
more beliefs about events than hoaxes involving acts or artifacts, and
tricks are generally “magic tricks” performed by magicians or a
drunken relative during the holidays. We would say that the Jackass
team plays practical jokes and performs stunts rather than hoaxes. Not
all “hoaxes” are hoaxes. For example, the “Moon Hoax”—the
belief that the 1969 Moon landing occurred in a studio—is a conspiracy
theory, not a hoax.

These
phenomena differ most in the intention behind them. People who spread
apocryphal tales usually do so out of the belief that they are true,
and these people have good intentions to inform and warn others. Conversely,
there is no necessary social value in spreading hoaxes, even if we think
they’re true. There is no obvious threat to anyone if there are (Cottingley)
fairies in the bottom of the garden.

But
there is a hidden threat. Unlike urban legends, hoaxes often have victims.
The hoaxed has something to lose, like money or credibility, while the
hoaxer has something to gain. Hoaxes usually result in personal gain
for the hoaxer, whether that is the amusement of pulling a prank, publicity,
or profit. In a prototypical hoax the hoaxer has the deliberate intention
to deceive, usually with malicious intent (although those who perpetuate
the hoax are not necessarily in on the hoax). An urban legend is misinformation
that needs to be corrected, while a hoax is a claim to be exposed.

“To
hoax” is closer to “to scam,” “to con,” and to dupe” and
leans uncomfortably toward words like fake, forge and
fraud and their legal implications. We don’t have names for the
faceless many who spread urban legends, whereas hoaxers are fraudsters,
charlatans, swindlers, scammers, crooks, and con-artists.

Missing Links

From Balloon Boy to the sale
of holy relics, there are many themes to hoaxes. Georgia’s Imedi television
created a political hoax in March 2010 falsely claiming that Russia
had invaded Georgia. Hoaxes are often financial, such as the notorious
Nigerian scams and other advance-fee frauds (and in a more broad sense,
pyramid schemes). For financial or personal reasons, people have faked
their own disappearances or even deaths.

Hoaxes
frequently have paranormal or pseudoscientific themes. These hoaxes
aim to make us believe a claim or to provide “evidence” of the supernatural.
These hoaxes are often cryptozoological in nature, involving alleged
anomalous animals. Some are hybrid creatures and sideshow “gaffs”
such as P.T. Barnum’s infamous Fiji Mermaid, which was probably a
monkey torso sewn onto a fish body. There has been an endless stream
of “missing links,” including Frank Hansen’s Minnesota Iceman
that toured carnivals in the late 1960s. This was a vinyl dummy, touted
as a humanoid creature, frozen in a block of ice. In what is probably
one of the world’s most infamous hoaxes, the head of the Piltdown
Man consisted of the lower jawbone of an orangutan attached to a human
skull. For forty years some experts believed the tampered remains were
of a descendent of humans.

There
are Bigfoot hoaxes aplenty, including the 2008 Dead Bigfoot Hoax in
which an alleged cryptid found in the foothills of Georgia was revealed
to be a costume. The 1967 Patterson-Gimlin film is more iconic than
convincing, but while it is the best-case Bigfoot hoax for skeptics,
it is the “gold standard” of evidence for Bigfoot believers.

Tell Me Lies…

The most successful hoaxes
are the ones that leave us wondering, “Was that a hoax?” There are
many enduring hoaxes that have become folklore “fact” well after
they were revealed to be hoaxes. The Fox sisters initiated the Spiritualism
movement with their séances, a practice that is still strong today
despite the sisters’ eventual public confession that they produced
the “paranormal” phenomena by cracking their toe joints and bouncing
apples off the floor. Doug Bower and Dave Chorley admitted that their
crop circles were art rather than alien, but this has done nothing to
lessen the perception of the circles as evidence of extraterrestrial
visitations.

In
1938 Orson Welles performed a radio adaptation of The War of the
Worlds by H.G. Wells. For some who missed the show’s introduction,
the radio drama was misconstrued as an emergency report of an extraterrestrial
landing on Earth. The “news” quickly developed into mass hysteria.
This wasn’t intended as a hoax, but the memory of the supposed “Martian
invasion” remains.

Usually
the hoaxer never intends to disclose the hoax. The truth is a secret
for the skeptics to unearth. In 1986 James Randi famously debunked TV
Evangelist Peter Popoff as a hot reader with a direct line to his wife
rather than God. This should have been a ruinous revelation, but Popoff’s
career has had a second coming. The proof of his deception has done
nothing to shake the belief of true believers.

Skeptical Hoaxes

Hoaxes are something that skeptics
are skeptical of, but sometimes the skeptics are the hoaxers.
Like a modern-day Houdini, James Randi often exposes hoaxes, but he
has also been the perpetrator of a few hoaxes himself.

From
1979–1983 two young psychics named Steve Shaw (Banachek) and Mike
Edwards demonstrated their paranormal abilities to a team of parapsychologists
in a laboratory. However, these “psychics” were really mentalists/magicians,
and their participation was a hoax orchestrated by James Randi. Named
Project Alpha,1 the hoax aimed to disprove complaints that
a lack of funding prevents parapsychologists from undertaking useful
experiments. Randi also wanted to show the need for a magician in the
laboratory. Edwards and Shaw were selected from some 300 applicants
to participate in the research project. They underwent over 160 hours
of “scientific” testing that never revealed that their “paranormal”
powers were mere magic tricks.

In
1988 American psychic José Alvarez arrived in Australia, claiming to
channel a 2,000-year-old spirit named Carlos. With his incredible ability
to stop his pulse he developed a fast following, save for a few narrow-minded
skeptics who were convinced he was a fake. Alvarez boasted an impressive
resume of appearances on (fake) television shows and radio stations
and in (fake) magazines and newspapers, because he was a fake.
The Carlos hoax was devised by Randi to demonstrate the ease of creating
a cult and to reveal the gullibility of the media and public.

The
Carlos hoax and Project Alpha are the most infamous “skeptical hoaxes,”
although there are many other examples of this kind. Before the Carlos
hoax, Bob Steiner toured Australia as psychic Steve Terbot in 1984.
Steiner is a magician and former president of the Society of American
Magicians, and he is the author of the book Don’t Get Taken.
He initially presented his cold-reading techniques as skills in astrology,
mediumship, and tarot and palm reading. After two weeks of amazing his
audiences, he finally revealed his hoax on national television, explaining
that his objective was to “warn the people of Australia to beware
of people claiming to be psychics.”2

In
the area of pseudoscience, physicist Alan Sokal penned the impressive-sounding
“Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics
of Quantum Gravity.” The piece was a hoax. The article’s premise
was that quantum gravity is a social construct, but the author’s premise
was that the phony piece would pass peer review in an academic journal.
The parody paper appeared in an issue of Social Text. In a subsequent
issue of Lingua Franca, Sokal explained that he aimed to see
if a scholarly journal would “publish an article liberally salted
with nonsense if it (a) sounded good and (b) flattered the editors’
ideological preconceptions.”3

Hoaxes
are a useful method of exposing other hoaxes. Inspired by the Virgin
Mary grilled cheese sandwich, I created my own piece of pop pareidolia,
the Pope Tart.4 In another debunking I applied for a job
with Absolutely Psychic. The application process should have revealed
my lack of psychic abilities as they claim, “Our clients immediately
notice that all readers are carefully handpicked. We are very ‘picky,’
and we’re proud of it! Unfortunately, 94.3% of most applications are
turned away.”5 I was offered a job as a telephone psychic.

Magician
Brian Brushwood hosts the popular Internet series Scam School.6
In this “Mythbusters” for the pool shark crowd, Brushwood pulls
street cons, swindling and scamming in the name of skepticism. He teaches
tricks “to get free drinks at bars and impress friends,” but the
underlying message is that anyone can be tricked.

The Moral of
This Story Is…

Skeptical hoaxes are social
experiments. They reveal human behavior under natural conditions. Their
purpose is to test media reporting and gauge the response of the public.
They are intended for public gain, not for personal gain. They are not
intended to deceive but rather to show us that we can all be deceived.
Unlike other hoaxes, the skeptical hoax will always be revealed because
that is the point.

In
contrast to other hoaxes that bank on credulity, skeptical hoaxes hope
to prompt critical thinking. Randi wanted people to see through his
hoaxes. During Project Alpha, the young magicians were instructed that
if confronted, they were to admit that the project was a hoax. But they
were never asked. If skeptical hoaxes fail to elicit critical thinking,
the hoaxers hope to teach critical thinking.

There
are valid arguments against creating skeptical hoaxes. By staging a
hoax the skeptical hoaxer can seem as bad as any other hoaxer. The hoax
can backfire or incite resentment: nobody likes a “gotcha” moment
or an “I told you so!” The worst thing that can happen is nothing:
the lesson goes unlearned or the lesson is easily forgotten.

The
ultimate success of hoaxes demonstrates that we can all be deceived.
Skeptical hoaxes show that we allow ourselves to be deceived. As Blaise
Pascal put it, “We like to be deceived.”

Karen Stollznow

Karen Stollznow is an author and skeptical investigator with a doctorate in linguistics and a background in history and anthropology. She is an associate researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, and a director of the San Francisco Bay Area Skeptics. A prolific skeptical writer for many sites and publications, she is the “Good Word” Web columnist for the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, the “Bad Language” columnist for Skeptic magazine, a frequent contributor to Skeptical Inquirer, and managing editor of CSI’s Scientific Review of Mental Health Practice. Dr. Stollznow is a host of the Monster Talk podcast and writer for the Skepbitch and Skepchick blogs, as well as for the James Randi Educational Foundation’s Swift. She can be reached via email at kstollznow[at]centerforinquiry.net.

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